The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Volatile memory devices, such as for example, Random Access Memory (RAM) including Dynamic RAM (“DRAM”) are generally considered to be secure because it is believed that their memories are erased immediately upon losing power. At normal operating temperatures, however, DRAM memory may take up to a few seconds after power is lost to dissipate, while at lower temperatures data can remain for minutes or even hours. This delay can leave the device vulnerable to a variety of attacks. For example, a cold-boot attack can occur when an attacker has physical access to a machine while a security key remains in main memory. The security key can be extracted from memory, defeating extensive security measures, such as for example, full-disk encryption. Software changes and/or hardware changes to avoid these security vulnerabilities may require significant time and expense to implement.